EEMBC, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, has joined the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) and has become ‘SPEC Embedded Group’ (SPEC EG). Both SPEC and EEMBC are non-profit organisations.

SPEC logo EEMBC joined SPEC
Started before the millennium by EDN magazine (hence the extra initial ‘E’), and later spun out, EEMBC has developed respected industry benchmarks for measuring the processing performance and energy efficiency of microcontrollers including CoreMark and IoTMark.

“Making quality benchmarks is extremely hard and only getting more complex,” said now retiring president and CTO of EEMBC Peter Torelli. “Continued success depends on bringing together seasoned and talented professionals to collaborate in a more comprehensive standards organisation.

“SPEC warmly welcomes EEMBC as the third major performance benchmark consortium to have chosen to join SPEC, enabling us to more broadly address the need for trusted independent computing benchmarks,” said SPEC President David Reiner. “With 40-plus standardised benchmarks, the combination of SPEC and EEMBC means the industry now has one source for benchmarks covering most areas of compute.”

EEMBC members gains access to workloads and harnesses developed across more than 20 committees at SPEC’s. “For example, SPEC EG benchmark developers can integrate the PTDaemon interface to enable measurements using an array of modern power analysers and temperature sensors”, said SPEC. “EEMBC also gains access to SPEC’s administrative resources, enabling it to reduce costs and increase investments. SPEC expands its portfolio of computing benchmarks to enable measurements from the smallest microcontroller to the largest supercomputers.”

Founding members of SPEC EG include representatives from Arm, Intel, Renesas, Silicon Labs, STMicroelectronics and Synopsys. SPEC has >120 members including computer hardware vendors, software vendors, educational institutions, research organisations and government agencies.